I will be the first to say that I don’t know much about this car other than that it’s flippin’ sweet. My parents were nice enough to take my me and my wife on a tour of Southern England in 2009, and all I did was ogle cars (but no Ogles, strangely). I snapped a few shots of this Star Sapphire in Stratford-Upon-Avon, and judging by the couple looking it over, they’re not that common in the UK, either.

Jeez, hun, didn’t we just see another one of these last week?

My literature tells me that Armstrong Siddeley only produced Star Sapphires from 1958 to 1960, before ceasing automotive production entirely. This above photo seems to show an emblem saying “Star” on the decklid, which is the only reason I’m guessing this is a Star Sapphire rather than an earlier Sapphire. Apparently, there were a few of these tanks entered in the Monte Carlo Rally earlier in the 1950s. If I were spending days crossing the frigid Alps, I’d rather drive one of these than a Volkswagen, too. I guess you can’t let a lack of sporting pretense get in the way of a flashy entrance into Monte Carlo.

Here I am! Did you guess correctly?

So…did you figure this was a Star Sapphire? They do grow on trees, you know.

Update (by PN): Here’s some pictures of the interiors of a couple of these, which help explain their high price ($6950 in the US).

The front, carved out of one solid walnut trunk (I kid).

The solid wood fold down trays are not visible in this shot. Truth is, there’s very little difference in the interior quality and materials from that of a Bentley or Rolls Royce, which cost three times as much.

83 Comments

Oh, you’ve got to love the British Upper Crust. Don’t you just love the way they hyphenate everything? You saw an Armstrong-Siddeley in Stoke-on-Trent? Oh, sorry, you said Stratford-Upon-Avon, or some such. Were you with Lord and Lady Wentworth-Wentwick when you spotted that car? Pardon me, I should have said “automobile.” That beautifully British beast is no mere ‘car.’ I suppose if I lived in Britain, I’d live in a less-impressive address… Something such as Allegro-on-the-Hard-Shoulder.

Rolls-Royce is also hyphenated, which will be news to the author of this piece. Also, the A-S was clearly built to a price, as evidenced in the second image, and which belies the entire point of the article. But whatever.

Well they both look like totally outdated crocks, but I imagine that that this is way cheaper. I’m still trying to wrap my head around this being a car made between 1958-1960. We were making cars that looked like they could go to the moon at the time and old blighty was still making things that looked like they were preWWII used cars, amazing.

Some quick gorilla math indicates that 2645GBP is $33K today, and $4300 back then, which would have bought you a 2door Buick Limited Riviera hardtop, think about that. This Conestoga wagon or a Buick Limited.

The exchange rate was fixed under Bretton-Woods. From the end of the war until 1948, it was $4.03 to the pound, from 1949 to 1968, it was $2.80 to the pound, and then from 1968 to 1972 (the end of Bretton-Woods) it was $2.40. After that, the sterling was allowed to float.

Bretton-Woods makes 1945 to 1970 exchange rate conversions pretty simple because they were fixed to the dollar — there were a few adjustments, but not many and there wasn’t the kind of daily fluctuation you get now.

Several years ago I came upon a two-tone gray 1953 Sapphire in the outdoor portion of the Centralia Swap Meet. I think the guy was surprised that I knew what it was. He said he didn’t really want to sell the car, but just wanted a close parking spot.

This was one of the featured vehicles in the very first cars-of-the-world books I saw in 1953 when I was 13, and for some reason stuck with me, although I’ve only ever seen two or three of the actual cars.

Havent seen one of these for a while my uncle in Sydney is an Armstrong Siddeley Man owning the only 1926 sedan in captivity and a 1934 model as well. Well made cars though they were in a declining market by 58 when this model debuted it competed with Jaguar on price but not performance the luxury features were all there but it failed.

Rover had the same problem – they built very conservative upper-middle-class cars for a very conservative upper-middle-class customer base. Which was fine for them at home, and exporting to countries like NZ that had a British connection, or ones like the Netherlands with no domestic auto industry to protect. But it went completely pear-shaped in America (France, Germany, Italy…) where such very conservative upper-middle-class buyers did not buy foreign at that point.

Jaguar succeeded because Jags looked different, flashy, foreign in an exotic way and appealed to an entirely more adventurous demographic.

This car debuted in 53 which accounts for the styling, they also made the smaller 234/236 which were available with manumatic transmission. the 3.9 L Star Sapphire was the last model before Armstrongs merged with Bristol and car production ceased

From the rear quarter it looks like an over grown Triumph Mayflower with that razor edge styling.
The main complaint about the Mayflower was that the styling looked bad on such a small car, but to my eye it doesn’t look any better on a big car.

Something about this car appeals to me. I really like the shape of the greenhouse, in fact the whole car just screams “I am veddy, veddy English.” From back when an English car could be immediately identified.

The only obvious difference between the Star Saphire and the previous Saphire is that the top of the grill was chrome on the earlier model. An uncle of mine had one of these, which I presume he bought new, and I remember him saying it had a hemi-head engine. You can get an idea of why they went under by looking at the junior 234/236 model they introduced in a bid to increase sales. They gave you a choice of 4 or 6 cylinder 2.3 litre engines – hows that for rationalisation ?
This car looks odd because the deadlights don’t appear to be the regular Lucas units, and that registration plate is not UK mainland but perhaps one of the colonies ?
The jet fighter connection is that Bristol Siddeley made aero engines, but after the war ended there was less demand for planes and car production became their bread-and-butter.

The distinction between the 234 and 236 would probably have been more meaningful in the days of the old RAC taxable horsepower scale (£ per RAC HP), which was based on bore and cylinder count — the six was only 19 cc bigger, but fell into the 18 HP bracket, whereas the big-bore 234 was in the 20 HP category.

The Star Sapphire had the new oversquare 3,990cc six with 165 hp, Borg-Warner (probably DG) automatic, Dunlop front discs, and power steering, so it wasn’t completely antediluvian.

On the aircraft side, the late ’50s was a difficult time for the British aviation industry. It had been doing okay since the end of the war despite the inevitable postwar drawdown, but in 1957, the Minister of Defence, Duncan Sandys, declared that guided missiles were the way of the future, which put the brakes on a huge number of British military aircraft projects. Some went ahead anyway, but some were canceled outright and development in that area really stalled. With a number of notable exceptions (like the GR.1 Harrier), the British ended up sticking with ’50s designs like the Lightning and Buccaneer well into the ’80s.

Essentially, Armstrong Siddeley was an aircraft and especially an aero-engine business – Armstrong Whitworth bought Siddeley-Deasley in 1919 and in the late 1920s John Siddeley purchased Armstrong Siddeley when Armstrong purchased the bigger and stronger Vickers company. Ultimately, this led to the creation of Hawker Siddeley (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawker_Siddeley), builder of some of Britain’s most famous aircraft, including the Hurricane, Hunter and Harrier, and now part of BAE Systems, as well as a variety of locomotives, trains and many other heavy engineering products. “Armstrong” is almost synonymous with advanced and innovative engineering with commercial success, for the period from 1850 to 1960. Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_Whitworth for more.

After some more corporate machination, Armstrong Siddeley was merged with Bristol Aero engines and ultimately Rolls-Royce in 1966. R-R was (and still is of course) principally an aero-engine business that built cars, just like Armstrong Siddeley. Product wise, Armstrong Siddeley was in a similar position to Daimler – trapped between genuine high quality, high craftsman ship products from R-R and Bentley on one side and challengers like Jaguar on the other. It doesn’t take an MBA to decide what to do, and similar choices were made elsewhere, for example Alvis.

Sidley. If in doubt with British pronunciation, emphasise the first syllable and eliminate as much of what follows (by letting it die away, or just ignoring it) as possible. Should you ever meet a Mr Featherstonehaugh, his name is pronounced “Fanshaw”.

I love that the British were building ’30’s designs into the ’60s. It was their signature, like the Bug, but in the luxury realm. They should have kept it up with something besides taxies.

My all time favorite in the genre of classic looks built late is the Mercedes Aidenauer in the 6 window pillarless hardtop. A college friend’s dad had one. Truly fascinating to see the American body style in a classic Benz. It had power windows (IIRC) and factory installed AC in the trunk that looked like an on board refrigerator.

Mercedes were using an ohc engine while Rolls Royce were still soldiering on with the Edwardian F head,even Harley Davidson had dropped the F head many years ago.These cars looked very staid and old fashioned compared with Cadillac,Lincoln and Imperial..

Armstrong-Siddeley really weren’t competing with Rolls-Royce, despite the surface similarities. They produced a smarter car than a Rover or Humber, but a lesser vehicle than a (pre-Jag) Daimler. They weren’t in the same league as Rolls-Bentley.

The Forces numberplate, and indeed the green, may suggest that this was the Brigadier’s car of choice. The multiplicity of car makes in the 1950s, and the ease with each can have a class label pinned on it, suggests to me that each army rank could be matched with a different and smarter motor car, from the Private’s old Ford to the Field Marshal’s Rolls-Royce.

Read all of them and came to the conclusion that the entire car operation from the mid 1930s to 1960 was nothing more than amateur hour. Really poorly organized if it can even be called that.

Sure, they had all manner of aeronautical engineers working on the cars but nothing sustained enough. Here one year, gone the next. They got lost having a great time theorizing on this and that, then forgot to hire a stylist. All the mechanical uselessness led to a 2 year delay in the initial rollout of the Sapphire till 1952. One can only imagine the unreliability.

I grew up in Blighty until the age of eleven in 1959 and was an anorak car-spotter. Only saw a few AS Sapphires, even fewer Alvises, but they looked like a better job all round. Sapphires looked lost and bewildered just like this one in the article – seemed to not look confident and were incredibly old-fashioned looking with sort of fake RR styling.

I assume only old rich widows with a lap dog and a chauffeur actually bought them. Nobody else lusted after them. We were Aston Martin then Jaguar in my boyhood.

A couple of days ago in the CC Clue, when all we could see of this car was a thumbnail pic of one headlamp, I was among those who thought we were looking at a Jag Mk. IX. But that’s only because I’d never heard of an Armstrong Siddeley Star Sapphire — or of Armstrong Siddeley at all — and you can’t nominate something you’ve never heard of.

Hey Paul, is that the same Armstrong that did the steering on your old F100?